Monday, January 5, 1981

Monday January 5th

Got to school as normal – only Julie Crabtree in the registration room when I got in, but shortly everyone was there – Deborah, Jeremy, Claire etc . . . . . .

First two lessons were free, and I passed them in the library with all the gang. Deborah said that she enjoyed Bulgaria, more than she expected. History went well again – for my timed essays at the end of last term I got two C’s, quite good considering!

The last lesson, normally Biology, was spent enjoyably in the common room talking to Claire, Julie, Lee, Deborah, Duncan and Jeremy – Claire started talking to me about a book she’d been reading about signs of affection people show; crossed legs, flicking hair from the forehead, speech alteration, sitting side by side etc., all quite amusing – it was noticed, that in the course of her explanation, she came and sat next to me, crossed her right leg toward me and was hesitant in speech – I’m not suggesting that these are serious indications at all, but they were obvious because Julie said “Notice how Claire has gone and sat next to you” – all quite thought-provoking and amusing.

The newspapers and television were full of the Strangler – an Ian Gordon Baxter of Durley Park Crescent, Holmeshaw – scenes were shown from the Whincliffe court house where he was taken at 4.30 for a five minute appearance – a crowd of 500-1000 gathered to shout abuse, demand death and throw pebbles. According to things Dad has gleaned from work, a knife and some women’s tights were found discarded in Whincliffe after a search. The trial will be interesting. Andrew went back at 10.15 a.m.

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ABOUT MERE PSEUD . . .

"It's about time you started thinking about the black dog on your back."

Mere Pseud emerges from the stain of a particular place at a particular time—England in the early 1980s, dreaming its way through the era of the Miner’s Strike, CND, Rock Against Racism, of Thatcher, the Falkland’s War and mass unemployment, an era that marks a turning point for British society, the advent of what we might call neoliberalism.

This four year long autofiction project mixes diary entries, cultural observation, teen confessionals, an enduring love for UK postpunk band The Fall, image-meditations on memory, and spoken word fragments; it’s a reckoning with the passages of time and the spectral intermingling of futures and pasts, a slantways slide through places, spaces, and states of mind.

This is the moveable backdrop; part social history, part prolonged personal pratfall, the spectral trace of a world that's already curiously antique.

"The journal has such familiar episodes . . . being a certain age at a certain time in history, the political atmosphere, cultural touchstones, living situations . . . desires to both escape and belong ending in nihilistic abyss of fuckitall."

PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE, SUMMER 1983

The Mere Pseud . . . The unreliable eighteen-year old modernist narrator of this fable. Now a student at Watermouth University. Perhaps he'll run into Howard Kirk?Barry, Stu, Pete, Penny, Gareth, Shelley, Lindsey. University friends.

Rowan Morrison. Dark-eyed changeling who lived a few doors down from the Mere Pseud his first year at Wollstonecraft. A little older and a little weirder than all the rest. Her dark sun sends a chill through the second floor corridors of Wollstonecraft.

Helen Vaughan . . . (1864-1919). Enigmatic Yorkshire novelist, author of The Harp of the Sky (1920), and inspiration for British horror writer Arthur Machen's character of the same name in his story "The Great God Pan." Occasional object of the Mere Pseud's obsessive thoughts about death, time, and the passing of all things.

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